The present invention relates to a transmitting apparatus, a receiving apparatus and a content transmitting method, being preferable for protecting a copyright of the content to be transmitted, when sending/receiving the contents, such as, video/audio, etc., through a network.
When transmitting contents between digital AV apparatuses, encoding is executed on a content transmitting apparatus side, while sharing information for decoding, commonly, between a content receiving apparatus side, so that the content cannot be received by equipment other than the content receiving apparatus, as a transmission address, correctly, and thereby implementing a copy protect for preventing limitless copying thereof.
As an example of such copy protect, which was already applied in a digital AV apparatus, is already know a method described in Japanese Patent Laying-Open No. 2007-104236, for example. With the method described in this Patent Document 1, contents are classified into, “no copy limit”, “copy once” and “copy inhibited”, to be managed, and on a recording apparatus, only the contents of “no copy limit” and “copy once” are recorded, while the content of “copy once” is treated as “no more copy” after recording it once, and they are transmitted after being treated with an encoding process on a transmitter side, but excepting the content of “no copy restriction”, on a content transmission through a wired or wireless-network; thereby protecting the contents from limitless copying thereof. Also, in this method are disclosed a method of inserting copy control information into the content, and a method of transmitting a part of the copy control information after describing it in a header portion of a transmission packet.